I think the article about reverse CBT and excessive online useage is VERY illuminating too.
It talks about Tumblr being the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs dating it back to the early 2010s, saying "Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone's social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession".
It didn't originate from Tumblr at all. Tumblr might have been where it became mainstream but it was there a long time before then.
I've been in online communities since 1998 - this was way before they became common - the one I was initially in was an online forum for a common interest in music. It was one of the first 10,000 such sites in the world I believe. By 2004 I'd met over 200 in real life from this community. There were numerous people who ended up married from it. This predates online dating. I later was in communities of a similar nature relating to gaming. My brother was a similar early adopter. Some of it was great. Some of it was so incredibly toxic and I have more than a couple of stories of where it was truly awful and somewhat disturbing. The reason I ended up on MN in the first place around 2007/8 was precisely because I was so jaded by the toxic nature of these communities and the level of misogny in them. I'd gone through a period of several years by that point of being a male online because it was so bad. (This made things more complicated when meeting people in real life or coming clean about who you really were). The online gaming communities were the worst. You'd be playing community games and not get taken seriously by the guys or youd be sexually targetted by them and it just ruined your experience. The levels of toxic masculinity were something else. Often being pushed by boys in their late teens rather than some of the older community members. I should add that by this point, I was in my early 30s and been around the block - I'd already been through my late teens, early twenties lamenting the fact that I wished I'd been a boy as girls looked shit with guitars - and I was in a solid relationship to someone I eventually got round to marrying. Some of the stuff that DH and I both saw going on with girls age 13/14 at the time was utterly dreadful. Imagine growing up in that? I at least started into it at age 19.
My point here, is I'm over 25 years down the line on some of this, and you've got academics talking about how it started just 10 years ago.
Thats kinda utter bollocks - these people aren't going back into the history. Huge amounts come directly from gaming and the exclusion of women from being equal in gaming.
Its something I have occasionally talked about in the past on MN and hardly something I'm just picking up on having read that article. I've been there since the start. From Dial Up.
NO ONE talks about it. No one has sought to look at this holistically about what change, where, why and the impact on it. NO ONE has bothered to ask the women who have lived through it. Just look at what happened with Gamergate.
Why is that? Why is there these huge silences and gaps in the sociology on this? Instead we get all this stuff from men about what we should do for girls in school and guff about why they have transitioned based upon their own male experiences. But never through the lens of women and girls and the pressures placed on them.
I am BEYOND frustrated with IT ALL on sooooo many levels. I feel like I'm walking in a parallel reality, where the truth slowly but surely is dripping through and people are waking up, but far too slowly.